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Abstract

Victorians needed names for new things, novel practices and emergent techniques. Cumulatively, these formed vocabularies, some by deliberation and design, others aggregating over time. The era abounds in private and specialised languages, modish slangs, and technical terms used in craft, industry, medicine, law, the arts and sciences. These vocabularies circulated through small networks or made the leap to the public realm where they could be considered in expanded lights and put to new and unfamiliar uses. This collection represents that diverse cross-section of the ways in which participants engaged with, and have since ...View more >Victorians needed names for new things, novel practices and emergent techniques. Cumulatively, these formed vocabularies, some by deliberation and design, others aggregating over time. The era abounds in private and specialised languages, modish slangs, and technical terms used in craft, industry, medicine, law, the arts and sciences. These vocabularies circulated through small networks or made the leap to the public realm where they could be considered in expanded lights and put to new and unfamiliar uses. This collection represents that diverse cross-section of the ways in which participants engaged with, and have since developed, the conference theme and the uncountable new directions in which Victorian studies is progressing. Ultimately, the essays collected here testify to Raymond Williams’s claim, in Keywords, that ‘It is true that no word ever finally stands on its own, since it is always an element in the social process of language, and its uses depend on complex and (though variably) systematic properties of language itself’ (22). Just as these vocabularies do not stand alone, so too the essays in this collection combine to demonstrate the complexity and interconnections of studies in Victorian language and literature.View less >